Sony RDRHXD970 - 250GB Hard Drive DVD Recorder

Sony RDRHXD970 - 250GB Hard Drive DVD Recorder
HDD DVD RECORDER 250GB INT DIG TV TUNER HDMI OUTPUT IN

Customer Review: Early days yet…but initial impressions poor.
Had my 970′ unit delivered to a neighbours house as I was out last week… She told me she had been also been out when it was delivered and later found it on the garden side of her six foot fence (with no access gate) sitting on its side in a huge ornamental flower pot ! I am frankly amazed that a ?300 (and very fragile) item could be handled so carelessly and now I’m just waiting for it to break down.

Performance, well, so far unimpressed, the freeview tuner is poor and cannot pick up, previously perfect ITV1 and C4 channels. My Samsung TV does not automatically switch over to it when wanting to watch a recording from DVD or HDD (does anyone know how to solve this?)and upscaling even with progressive scan setting to ‘on’ is no better than my replaced ?29.00 Philips DVD player! Only redeeming feature is ’series recording’. Moral of the story…. stay in for delivery and consider carefully whether you think a Sony branded, Pioneer recorder is really worth this kind of money.

Customer Review: Can a black box change your life?
I bought this after a bad experience with a Sony 860 (which went back), so I approached this machine with some trepidation. The previous machine had great facilities, but just didn’t work very well (poor sound, switched itself on and off etc!). Happily, this is a wonderful piece of kit and brilliant value for the money. Recordings to the HDD drive are superb (especially in HQ), and the EPG and series link work well. Setting programmes to record is so easy and dubbing to DVD is also simple and fast. Reviewing what has been recorded is a breeze; the recording list has thumbnails which play excerpts to remind you what the programme contains, as well as the programme title, time it was recorded, channel (BBC1..) etc.! Being able to start watching a recording before it has finished and the ease and fuss-free operation actually changes the way you watch TV. Also, it is a great DVD player and the upscaling via the HDMI link makes standard DVDs look near ‘HD’ quality. What’s not to like?

-

LG RH177 DVD Recorder (DVD+R Double Layer) + 80GB HDD
Customer Review: Multi-region?
I got this earlier in the year but it does not play anything DVD’s other than region 2 DVD’s. Be wary.
Customer Review: good but problems connecting to NTL!!!
I have recently purchased this DVD recorder, but am having great problems utilising its different functions. I use NTL, and cannot seem to programme the channels into the recorder, so at present I cannot record anything from TV. The recorder seems to pick up only one channel (the one that I have the NTL set on at that moment). It doesnt pick up any other channels! has anyone had (and hopefully solved!) similar problems? or any advice would be fantastic as this problem is really driving me mad! Except from that it delivers a good picture through my plasma, and can watch films (dvd/divx/avi) with no problems and easy operation! please email shona 569@hotmail.com or call 07810 543300 many thanks!

Sony RDR-GX120 Dual Format / Dual Layer DVD Recorder
DVD+R/+RW, +R double layer disc recording.
Used Price: ?54.99
Customer Review: No problems so far
I ordered this product with much trepidation bearing in mind some of the negative earlier reviews. However, I wanted a cheap DVD recorder to archive material from my Sky+ hard disk, and this model was recommended to me elsewhere (and does have some good reviews elsewhere on the web). I’m pleased that so far the machine does exactly what I want. It’s easy to set up (I just connected SCARTs to my TV and Sky+ box; I didn’t bother with the aerial), the manual is OK, and I was surprised by how easy it is to use - as soon as I figured out that: (i) the correct set-up for the outputs is video/video-RGB/video (thanks for another review on Amazon for this), and (ii) you have to select the input (as Line 3 - otherwise if you switch the TV off the recording will stop! The quality of the recording is fine, even on the lower standards, and the discs play back just fine on my Mac. The sound recording level is a bit on the low side, though. The recorder looks OK, too, although the remote feels a bit cheap. I haven’t noticed any particular noise, and formatting is acceptably fast to me. As I say, my needs are rather specific, and if I wanted to do more I might find some of the problems others report. Also I’ve only had it a week, so there’s still time for the other problems to manifest themselves!
Customer Review: Disgusting waste of money
For starters we nearly didn’t get this dvd recorder because the 3rd party company that amazon jipped us into buying from didn’t leave a second ‘failed delivery’ slip so they nearly got away with our money and no product. As for the recorder? Well its aweful. I own a panasonic 5.1 surround sound with dvd recorder. Its awesome, quick recording and so many brilliant functions. My parents used it and decided to get one instead of sky plus. I looked on here and recommended this one as it had great reviews and it sony. You’d think that would be enough? Turns out this recorder is one of the worst i’ve ever come across. When you turn it on it takes forever to load the disks. The remote is aweful and navigating the menus becomes a drawn out affair. It takes about 2 mins to write to disk if you record for more than half an hour and decided it doesn’t like recording on the timer and sometimes skips record times. It doesn’t even support JPEGS!!! It doesn’t support all disks so i really can’t see why you would pay ?119.99 for it. Its quite horrific so just stay clear.

Samsung DVD-SR150M/XEU Multi Format Freeview HDMI DVD Recorder
Multi Format Freeview DVD Recorder
Amazon Price: ?132.15

Philips DVDR3450H/05 Hard Disk / DVD Recorder
Amazon Price: ?183.24
Customer Review: Very nasty product
I have had this machine about 6 months and it’s just about to go back to be repaired again. Even when it’s working, it’s so painfully slow that you end up pressing the button several times thinking it’s not doing anything. It takes about 2 minutes to warm up for a start. The most annoying thing for Sky/cable viewers is that it never remembers to default to the scart socket on startup. So you have to go through an agonisingly slow process of selecting ALL the other possible inputs in turn before being able to select the main scart input. Pretty irritating when you have to do that every time. Frankly it’s rubbish and Philips should be ashamed of themselves. I’ve had one of their microwaves for 20 years and the bulb hasn’t even gone yet. Something’s gone a bit wrong with their quality since then it seems.